10 juil. 2025

Quick Blender Recipes: Raw Soups, Sauces, Hummus

One bowl of raw spinach and avocado soup delivers 238 kcal, 4.25 g of protein and 20.7 g of fat: half an avocado and a spoonful of oil weigh far more than the 200 g of spinach. Hummus made with tinned chickpeas contains 0.46 g of salt per 100 g; the same hummus made with home-cooked chickpeas contains 0.04 g, eleven times less, at the same energy density. These figures come from calculating the three recipes on this page against the ANSES Ciqual 2020 composition table, and they change how you dose everything.

A blender does not make food healthier. It changes texture, eating speed, sometimes the glycaemic response, and it shifts the microbiological risks to places nobody expects: garlic stored under oil, the jar of tahini, uncooked pulses. This page gives the three recipes, their calculated values, what blending genuinely changes according to the available trials, and the handful of safety rules worth knowing.

What the three recipes actually deliver

The values below come from the ANSES Ciqual 2020 table applied to the exact quantities given later on. Missing energy values were recalculated using the conversion factors in Annex XIV of Regulation (EU) 1169/2011 (protein and carbohydrate 4 kcal/g, fat 9 kcal/g, fibre 2 kcal/g).

Preparation	Serving	Energy	Protein	Fat	Fibre	Salt
Raw spinach and avocado soup	355 g (1 bowl)	238 kcal	4.25 g	20.7 g	5.6 g	0.21 g
Raw tomato sauce	100 g	38 kcal	0.96 g	2.07 g	1.37 g	0.01 g
Hummus, tinned chickpeas	100 g	182 kcal	6.85 g	9.85 g	5.08 g	0.46 g
Hummus, home-cooked chickpeas	100 g	172 kcal	7.82 g	7.77 g	6.63 g	0.04 g

Three readings follow. The raw soup is a fatty dish: 20.7 g of fat per bowl, of which 19.9 g come from the avocado and the olive oil and only 0.8 g from the spinach. Its protein supplies 7.1 % of the energy, below the 12 % threshold that in Switzerland allows a food to be called a source of protein under Annex 13 of the FDHA Ordinance on Food Information (OIDAl, SR 817.022.16). It is not a protein-led main course, and any article presenting it as one is wrong.

Hummus clears that threshold: 15.1 % of energy as protein in the tinned version, 18.2 % in the home-cooked one. It also meets the source of fibre threshold, set at 3 g per 100 g or 1.5 g per 100 kcal. Only the home-cooked chickpea version reaches the 6 g per 100 g needed for a high fibre claim. The gap comes entirely from the tin: drained tinned chickpeas contain 5.45 g of fibre and 0.54 g of salt per 100 g, against 8.2 g of fibre and 0.03 g of salt for boiled chickpeas.

The raw tomato sauce is the only one of the three that stays genuinely light: 38 kcal per 100 g, more than half of it from the 10 g of added oil. It supplies 13.9 mg of vitamin C per 100 g, roughly 17 % of the Swiss nutrient reference value of 80 mg set in Annex 10 of the OIDAl.

Blending lowers the glycaemic response rather than raising it

The idea that shredding dietary fibre worsens the glycaemic response circulates widely. A crossover trial published in Nutrients in 2022 points the other way. Twenty healthy young adults consumed, on two occasions, a gala apple and blackberries, either whole or put through a blender. Peak glucose and incremental area under the curve were significantly lower after the blended fruit (p < 0.05), with 60-minute glucose marginally lower (p = 0.057). The authors suggest fibre and nutritive components released from ground blackberry seeds as the mechanism.

This is a twenty-person trial on two fruits, not a general law. It is enough, though, to dismiss the alarmist version: blending whole fruit is not the same as juicing it, because the fibre stays in the jug. The decisive difference is what you remove. A juice leaves the pulp behind; a smoothie keeps it. The NHS advises limiting juices and smoothies to a combined total of 150 ml a day and drinking them with meals, because crushing releases the sugars and exposes teeth. That limit applies to drinks, not to a savoury soup or a spread.

Soup, drink, solid: what fills you and what does not

A preload study published in Physiology and Behavior compared, in 31 adults, solid and liquefied versions of identical foods, all calibrated to 300 kcal. The soups reduced hunger and increased fullness as much as the solid foods did. The beverage had the weakest effect of the three. Daily energy intake tended to be lower on soup days and highest on beverage days. The authors attribute most of the effect to cognitive factors: a soup reads as a meal, a drink reads as an accompaniment.

The practical consequence is concrete. A raw soup served in a bowl, eaten with a spoon at the start of a meal, behaves like a dish. The same preparation poured into a glass and drunk standing behaves like a beverage, with weaker satiety for the same energy. Since that spinach and avocado bowl carries 238 kcal, the container is not a decorative detail.

Raw spinach and avocado soup

Makes two bowls of 355 g. Allow ten minutes.

200 g fresh spinach leaves
1 ripe avocado (about 145 g of flesh)
1 garlic clove (5 g)
50 g onion (optional)
25 g lemon juice, half a lemon
10 g olive oil
275 g cold water or cooled vegetable stock
Salt, pepper, fresh herbs

Rinse the spinach in cold water and spin it dry. Stone the avocado, peel the garlic and onion. Put the softest items, avocado and lemon, at the bottom of the jug: the vortex forms more easily and the motor works less. Add the spinach in handfuls, blend on low then increase the speed. Pour in the water gradually until the texture is right. Salt at the very end, tasting as you go: salt calls for more salt, and the recipe already brings 0.21 g per bowl before seasoning.

This bowl supplies 48 mg of vitamin C, 60 % of the Swiss reference value, and 270 µg of folate, 135 %. It also supplies 535 µg of vitamin K1 per serving, more than seven times the reference value of 75 µg. For almost everyone, that content is irrelevant. It matters for people on a vitamin K antagonist such as warfarin or acenocoumarol: the NHS states that foods rich in vitamin K affect how the medicine works, that they need not be avoided, but that any major dietary change should be discussed with the anticoagulation clinic. Adding a large daily bowl of raw spinach to a stabilised treatment is exactly that kind of change.

Two useful adjustments. To make the dish protein-led, add 60 g of cooked chickpeas or 30 g of silken tofu before blending: protein then rises above the 12 % of energy threshold. To lighten it, halve the avocado and rebuild the texture with 30 g of raw courgette.

Raw tomato sauce

Makes about 555 g, enough for four plates of pasta.

480 g ripe tomatoes, about four medium ones
1 garlic clove (5 g)
55 g red onion (optional)
5 g fresh basil
10 g olive oil
Salt, pepper

Wash the tomatoes, remove the stem scar and cut them into quarters. A modest blender will chop even three-centimetre pieces far better than a whole tomato. Use short pulses rather than a continuous run: a raw sauce blended too long emulsifies, pales and takes on a foamy taste. Add the basil at the very end, with the motor almost off, so it does not blacken.

Acidity is the real flavour question. A pinch of sugar masks it without adding anything; a riper tomato or 20 g of raw red pepper does the same job with sugars that were already in the vegetable. If the sauce stays aggressive, the tomatoes were usually too firm.

This sauce keeps for two days in the fridge, in a sealed jar, on a lower shelf. It contains neither added acidifier nor heat treatment; it is not a preserve, and it does not freeze well, since the water in the tomato crystallises and leaves a mealy texture on thawing.

Blender hummus

Makes about 570 g, fourteen servings of 40 g.

400 g cooked chickpeas, drained
60 g tahini
40 g lemon juice
1 to 2 garlic cloves (10 g)
60 g iced water
Salt, pepper, cumin

Start by whipping the tahini, lemon juice and iced water on their own, without the chickpeas, until you have a pale cream. Tahini contains 53.4 g of fat per 100 g; emulsified with acid and cold water before the starch goes in, it gives a noticeably lighter texture than blending everything at once. Then add the chickpeas and garlic and blend for at least two minutes, scraping the sides.

Removing the chickpea skins improves smoothness and nothing else: the fibre they hold stays in the preparation to within a few tenths of a gram, since most of it sits in the cotyledon.

The choice of chickpeas decides two values. With tinned chickpeas, this recipe gives 182 kcal, 6.85 g of protein, 5.08 g of fibre and 0.46 g of salt per 100 g. With dried chickpeas soaked and boiled without salt, it gives 172 kcal, 7.82 g of protein, 6.63 g of fibre and 0.04 g of salt. The tin saves forty minutes of cooking and costs eleven times the salt. Rinsing tinned chickpeas thoroughly removes part of that salt without bringing it down to the home-cooked level.

A 40 g serving of the home-cooked version supplies 69 kcal, 3 g of protein, 2.1 g of fibre and 27 mg of calcium. Against the 30 g of fibre a day the NHS recommends, when adults average only about 20 g, that serving covers 7 % of the target. Hummus is a good food, not a shortcut.

Tahini is the weak point of this recipe

Two documented outbreaks had tahini as their vehicle, and in both cases hummus was what made people ill. In November 2012 New Zealand recorded 27 salmonellosis cases across three serotypes, 16 of them with a pulsed-field profile indistinguishable from the one isolated in imported tahini; the episode stopped after a trade withdrawal and consumer recall. In the United States in 2011, 23 cases of Salmonella Bovismorbificans across seven states and the District of Columbia were traced to tahini used in the hummus of one restaurant.

Sesame paste is a dry, low-moisture product that nobody spontaneously associates with a pathogen. That is precisely what makes the vehicle effective: tahini receives no cooking in a hummus recipe, it is eaten as it comes, and contamination arising at roasting or grinding travels the whole chain. The practical consequences are simple: buy tahini from a distributor subject to the usual Swiss controls, respect the date on the jar, keep an opened jar refrigerated, and never dip in with a spoon that has already been in another dish.

Finished hummus is a high water activity product, so it favours microbial growth. A study published in Foods in 2023 followed ready-to-eat hummus stored at 4 °C: the control had a shelf life of about 19 days, extended to about 25 days with 5 % vinegar and about 30 days with garlic and vinegar, the vinegar treatments achieving 2.2 to 3.2 log reductions in total aerobic counts at 21 days. Those figures describe a product made and packed under industrial conditions. Home-made hummus, prepared in a non-sterile bowl with hands and a knife, does not behave that way: three days in the fridge is a sensible limit, and the lemon juice contributes more as an acidifier than as a flavour.

Garlic in oil: the risk most often ignored

Keeping chopped garlic under a layer of oil, very convenient when you blend often, has a precise precedent. In February 1989 three cases of botulism occurred in the United States after people ate garlic bread made from a garlic-in-oil product; the leftover product measured pH 5.7 and contained high concentrations of Clostridium botulinum and toxin. It was the second episode linked to a product of that kind, and it led the US regulator to require microbial inhibitors or acidifying agents in such products. An earlier outbreak, traced from Vancouver, affected 36 people through commercial chopped garlic in soybean oil.

The mechanism is documented in the FDA Bad Bug Book: almost any food with a pH above 4.6 can support growth of C. botulinum and toxin production, and 4 to 5 % salt is needed to inhibit the spores. Raw garlic is barely acidic, oil creates an oxygen-free environment, and a fridge slows without stopping. Keep garlic dry and whole, and peel it when you blend. If you want a ready supply, freeze it in portions rather than drowning it in oil.

Two further safety points are worth noting. Honey must not be given before the age of 12 months: it is the one dietary reservoir of infant botulism established by both laboratory and epidemiological studies. And pulses are never blended raw, which deserves its own section.

Raw pulses do not belong in a blender

The idea of a spread made from kidney beans or lentils simply soaked and then blended keeps reappearing in raw recipes. For beans it is dangerous. Phytohaemagglutinin, a lectin, is present in raw red kidney beans at 20,000 to 70,000 haemagglutinating units, against 200 to 400 once fully cooked. Four or five raw beans are enough to trigger symptoms, which appear one to three hours after ingestion: violent nausea, severe vomiting, then diarrhoea. In the seven British episodes between 1976 and 1979, the attack rate was 100 % of those exposed.

Cooking destroys the toxin, provided it is real cooking. Soaking for at least five hours, discarding the water, then boiling for at least thirty minutes is the procedure. Slow cookers are explicitly advised against for these beans: measured dishes often reached only 75 °C, not enough to destroy the lectin, and prolonged lukewarm temperature is worse than useless. White kidney beans contain about a third of the toxin of the red variety, broad beans 5 to 10 %.

Red lentils and chickpeas raise less of a toxicological problem, but raw starch stays hard to digest and the texture is gritty: cook them. The one pulse that blends raw is the sprouted chickpea, and even then in small amounts and for a specific purpose.

Acid-base balance is not an argument

Recipes for blended raw vegetables often come with a promise of alkalising the body. The systematic review and meta-analysis published in Nutrition Journal in 2011 examined that hypothesis against Hill’s criteria for causality: of 238 studies identified, 55 met the inclusion criteria, including 22 randomised trials. Urinary calcium excretion does rise with dietary acid load, but balance studies show no loss of whole-body calcium; no study demonstrated a mechanism operating at physiological pH, and no trial documented osteoporosis progression linked to that load. The authors conclude that no causal association is supported and that an alkaline diet does not protect bone.

A systematic review published in BMJ Open in 2016 ran the same exercise on cancer: 8,278 citations identified, 252 abstracts reviewed, a single study meeting the criteria, no randomised trials, no evidence of a link between acidifying diets, alkaline water and cancer.

Blended raw vegetables have genuine merits, measurable in fibre, potassium, folate and vitamin C. Blood pH is not among them: it is held within a narrow range by breathing and the kidney, regardless of what is in the bowl.

Green juice cleanses are not an intensified smoothie

A case published in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases describes acute oxalate nephropathy in a 65-year-old woman following a cleanse of green juices made from oxalate-rich leafy vegetables. Her kidney function was normal before the cleanse; it progressed to end-stage renal disease. Two predisposing factors were present: a remote gastric bypass and recent prolonged antibiotic therapy.

A single case does not establish a frequency. It does indicate a direction: concentrated, repeated intake of oxalate-rich plants, in liquid form and replacing meals, raises oxalate absorption in a way that a few spinach leaves in a soup does not. People with chronic kidney disease, a history of bariatric surgery or calcium oxalate stones are the first concerned, and should speak to their doctor before any cleanse.

The soup on this page, with 200 g of spinach split over two bowls, is not in that category. A routine of three large daily glasses of raw spinach, chard and sorrel for a fortnight is.

Storage: temperatures, not impressions

The reference points are public and simple. The UK Food Standards Agency recommends a fridge set between 0 and 5 °C, a freezer around -18 °C, a maximum of four hours out of the fridge during preparation, and leftovers eaten within two days or frozen. Defrosted food must be used within 24 hours, and defrosting happens in the fridge, not on the worktop.

In Switzerland, the FDHA Hygiene Ordinance (SR 817.024.1) requires that ready-to-eat foods liable to support the growth of pathogenic micro-organisms be kept at temperatures preventing that growth, and that the cold chain not be broken. Frozen products are kept at -18 °C or below, with surface layers staying at -15 °C at most. Those rules target professionals, but the temperatures they set are the same for everyone.

In practice: the raw tomato sauce keeps two days, home-made hummus three days, the raw soup one day because the avocado browns and the texture separates. A glass jar makes visual checking easy and washes at high temperature, which a porous plastic lid does not always allow. Cool before sealing: a warm sealed container keeps its contents in the bacteria-friendly temperature range for a long time.

Seven mistakes that ruin a blended preparation

Loading the jug in the wrong order. Liquids and soft items at the bottom, leaves and hard pieces on top. Otherwise the blade spins in air and the motor overheats.

Blending a raw sauce too long. The emulsion pales and the flavour turns foamy. Short pulses are enough.

Salting before tasting. Tinned-chickpea hummus already brings 0.46 g of salt per 100 g, and the daily reference intake is 6 g under Annex 10 of the OIDAl.

Fixing texture with more olive oil. In the soup, 10 g adds 90 kcal for almost no micronutrients. If the texture is thin, add avocado or courgette instead.

Keeping garlic in oil. As above: the pH of raw garlic and the absence of oxygen form exactly the environment documented in the botulism episodes.

Using a slow cooker for kidney beans. It does not get hot enough to destroy the lectin.

Confusing soup with a drink. At equal energy, one fills you like a meal and the other does not.

Adapting to different profiles

People on vitamin K antagonists can eat spinach, but should keep intake steady rather than introducing a daily bowl abruptly, and should mention it to their anticoagulation clinic.

People with calcium oxalate kidney stones or chronic kidney disease should limit large daily amounts of blended raw leaves and seek medical advice before any juice cleanse.

Children under one year must not be given honey. For older children, the preparations on this page are fine in reduced portions and without chilli.

Anyone aiming to raise protein intake gains more by adding chickpeas or silken tofu to the soup than by multiplying smoothies: our complete guide to plant proteins sets out the reference portions.

Anyone who digests pulses poorly can start at 20 g of hummus rather than 40 g, and read what soaking and sprouting changes.

What this page does not say

The nutritional values come from the ANSES Ciqual 2020 table, which describes French foods. Tomatoes, spinach or chickpeas sold in Switzerland may differ, particularly by season and variety. Deviations on macronutrients stay modest; those on the vitamin C of a leafy vegetable can be wider depending on freshness.

The blended fruit trial covers 20 young healthy participants, two fruits, a single occasion. The satiety preload study dates from 2005 and covers 31 adults. Neither supports conclusions about long-term effects.

The storage durations given here are orders of magnitude for a domestic kitchen, not regulatory limits. Anything that has sat out of the cold, smells different or has changed texture goes in the bin, whatever the date.

Frequently asked questions

Can a stick blender replace a jug blender? For the tomato sauce and the hummus, yes, with longer blending and a slightly coarser texture. For raw leaves, no: a stick blender chops spinach without reducing it, and the result stays stringy.

Does hummus count towards five a day? Pulses count only once a day in 5 A Day style recommendations, however much you eat, because their nutrient profile differs from that of vegetables. In Switzerland, the FSVO separately recommends pulses at least once a week, one portion being 60 g dry weight.

Do chickpeas need peeling? Only for texture. The fibre difference is negligible, and the job takes a quarter of an hour for 400 g.

Is raw soup richer in vitamins than the same soup cooked? For vitamin C, yes, it is heat-sensitive. For iron, calcium or fibre, no, cooking does not destroy them. Some carotenoids actually become more available after heating.

Can these preparations be frozen? Hummus freezes well in portions, with a splash of water and a fresh blend on thawing. Raw tomato sauce loses its texture. Avocado soup browns and separates.

How long does tahini keep once opened? Refrigerated, several weeks within the manufacturer’s date. It separates, which is normal; just stir. A rancid smell means the fats have oxidised and the jar goes.

Does blending destroy fibre? It fragments fibre without making it disappear. The fibre stays counted in the final product, which is what separates a smoothie from a juice, where the pulp is removed.

Does a powerful blender heat food? Prolonged high-speed blending raises the temperature slightly through friction. Over one to two minute runs the effect stays marginal; it is mostly an argument for pulsing rather than running continuously.

Going further

The machine matters less than the method, but it does matter: our criteria for choosing a blender cover useful power and accessories. To cook pulses in batches and avoid salted tins, see legume batch cooking. Tahini goes well beyond hummus in our quick cold sauces and our batch of plant-based sauces. For sweet versions, our balanced smoothies apply the same composition rules. Finally, the top 10 pantry pulses and the complete meal salad extend these recipes into full dishes, and proper storage of fruit, vegetables and pulses prevents waste upstream.